Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time which it first made its appearance and preserved.Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights.The photographer’s way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject.Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends upon our own way of seeing.

From Ways of Seeing by John Berger, based on his 1972 BBC television series of the same name.